I’m just going to put it out there: The Blue Chair Café doesn’t look like much from the outside.

In fact, you may pull up in front of the Blue Chair Café one sunny morning, just as I did, take one look at the shabby strip mall and the underwhelming signage, and question whether that’s really where you want to have brunch after all. I can tell you right now: It is.

Inside, it’s like another world.

The restaurant is lovely and cool. An eclectic and interesting place with vintage lamps hanging from the ceiling, different salt and pepper shakers on each table, and walls, dishes and furniture in a rainbow of colours. On our visit, the restaurant was bright and warm, with sunbeams streaming in through the windows, and what can only be described as a really great vibe. It was filled with the happy chatter of a bustling restaurant, and the mellow strains of some Hawaiian-flavoured music as part of the restaurant’s Sunday jazz brunch. By the time the coffee arrived, life was perfect.

The Blue Chair has a good looking roster of live music in the evening, and I’ve heard great things about the dinner menu, including some of the new Mexican dishes.

The brunch offerings are mostly comprised of traditional brunch fare but with some interesting tweaks and flourishes. We opted to try the huevos rancheros ($13.50), one of my all-time favourite brunch dishes. There was a handful of tempting alternative takes on eggs Benedict — including one with smoked salmon on Russian rye — but we opted to try the basic Benny ($13.50), a classic version made more interesting with capicolla ham and buckwheat sunflower bread. We couldn’t pass up the blueberry yogurt pancakes with maple-alder smoked bacon ($13.50), particularly since the menu claims they’re the best pancakes in town. I really think they may be.

I’m not usually even a pancake fan, but I loved these pancakes. They were fluffy and a bit creamy, jazzed up a tad by the tartness of the berries, and then perfectly mellowed with golden syrup and crispy bacon.

The Benny was everything a Benny should be, topped with a rich, creamy hollandaise, and served alongside a pile of delicious herby potatoes. Both the Benny and the pancakes were also accompanied by a side of ripe fresh fruit, and the quality of the ingredients and the care in the preparation was clearly evident in everything on the table.

The huevos rancheros were served open-faced style, with eggs, lettuce and sour cream on a bed of black beans, and a quartet of small corn tortillas on the side. Unfortunately, this dish was a bit disappointing.

The tortillas were served unheated and came off a bit chalky and dry, and the amount of lettuce took away from the flavours at the heart of the dish. It was OK — and a good vehicle for the restaurant’s terrific homemade hot sauce — but I’m not sure I would order the dish again, especially with those terrific pancakes on the menu, and some of the other intriguing plates I saw going by.

The only thing I missed was the option of a brunch cocktail. A mimosa and maybe a couple of custom Bloody Marys would be a nice addition to the menu, a final touch to a great brunch.

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